Watercolour style tattoo in teal, green and pale pink washes running down the spine of a woman's bare back, with a thin black line along the spine.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour wash down the spine

Back · Colour · Photo

A woman with her back to the camera shows an abstract tattoo that begins between the shoulder blades and runs down the spine. Soft, feathered washes of teal, green and grey fade into the skin, with a single fine dark line extending along the spine to the lower back. The composition is centred on the back, with the wash concentrated at the upper section and the line tapering towards the waist.

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ada, the mist came off the fen again this morning before the men were up, and I stood at the sluice with the plumb line swinging in my hand and watched the water go the colour of old pewter, then teal where the sun caught the reeds. You will laugh, but I have stopped trusting my eyes out here and started trusting the line.

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The bailiff wants the drain marked straight from the mill to the church tower, and the ground will not oblige. Every ditch I sight bends a little left, as if it remembers an older river. Yesterday I walked the bank with a chalk pencil and a bundle of willow stakes, and where the stakes went into the grey clay they darkened to green within the hour, bleeding into the soil like wet paint on blotting paper. Mr Pell said it was the tannin. I said nothing, because I had begun to think the land was keeping its own record and we were only copying it badly.

So I drew it the way the water moved, not the way the bailiff ruled it. One thin black line down the middle of the sheet, from the high ground at Hob's Wood to the place where the sluice gates rust shut, and round it a soft wash of colour that thins the further it strays from the spine. When the ink dried it looked less like a map than a feather of weather held up to a window, and I laughed out loud alone in the office.

I'm sending the sheet with this letter. Keep it flat, and don't let the damp at your window reach it. I will come home at Michaelmas, and you can tell me which of us was wrong about the river.

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From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.